Author: John W Gillis

Media & Culture

The Heart of the Matter (part 2)

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My last post ended up focusing on the need to understand the nature of the problem of pornography, but what I’m really trying to get at is understanding how people are shaped by the ideas they encounter and absorb, how this is particularly true of children, and how this generality might be applied to the concrete situations parents find themselves in when confronted with the need to make decisions regarding their children’s involvement in pop culture, with its attendant mores. I take it for granted that everything we encounter in life, includ...

Media & Culture

The Heart of the Matter (part 1)

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It seems to me there is little more critical for a parent to do than to work to understand exactly why and how things - and the ideas they convey - are dangerous for our children, so that decisions can be made and guidelines set that are based on sound principles, so they can be applied consistently, and eventually understood rationally by the children, which will allow them to likewise make their own principled decisions based on a sound understanding of the nature of the threats the world presents to them.

Church

Athanasius the Great

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Today, May 2nd, is the feast day of Saint Athanasius the Great. Athanasius was, in a sense, the Saint Paul of the Constantinian era – maligned, persecuted, exiled, all for defending the triune faith against scholarly innovators, false brethren, and over-reaching politicians. It’s unrealistic to say that he defeated Arianism, since it continued to flourish as a rampant heresy long after his death, but he certainly deserves the lion’s share of the credit for repudiating it doctrinally, and it was his theological genius that gave us Trinit...

Media & Culture

My 10-Year Old Wants an iPod…

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My Abby wants an iPod for her 10th birthday next week. I guess they’re all the rage within 4th grade. But I’m just not comfortable with it. I feel a collision coming, and it’s not unexpected. The collision will be between my sensibilities and the cultural norms (dare I say: fads) which shape the environment my young children are discovering as they grow up. Having the girls attend a parochial school, a decision which was primarily based on the desire to provide them a learning environment with at least one foot solidly planted in Cathol...

Religion & Society

Benedict’s Challenge to American Anti-Authoritarianism

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Pope Benedict XVI’s Yankee Stadium homily last Sunday was quite a celebration of American Catholicism, but the pontiff never strayed far from his theme of the unchanging need for faithful Christians, as a community rooted in the apostolic heritage, to be a sign of the gospel’s hope for mankind in the face of sin and death, through bearing witness to the unity of the truth found in the Word of God, revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. This rootedness is not something Benedict sees simply in the hierarchical form of the Church (even if ...

Church

Recovering from the Papal Mass

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As evidenced by my last post, I tried very hard to get myself pumped up for yesterday’s occasion of attending the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. The Mass was very nicely done, and it was wonderful to hear a stadium full of people thunder “Amen” and the other responses, but it was still a massive crowd attending an orchestrated “event,” and both these factors, unsurprisingly, wore on me greatly. I think it probably would have been a categorical pleasure for me had the organizers of the event chosen to focus solely on the pope&...

Ruminations

Hitting the Road to Worship with Pope Hope

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In less than 36 hours, Joyce and I will be in New York, for the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. I’m very much looking forward to the experience, even if it means getting on a bus at 6:00am, and spending four hours traveling each way, just to sit high in the upper deck of the stadium. As much as anything else, I’m looking forward to the community. I expect celebrating the Mass with 50,000 Christians, or whatever it works out to be, will be exhilarating. I get energized on Holy Days when several hundred people crowd the church where I typically c...

Media & Culture

Celebrity Gossip and Moral Reasoning (part 2)

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Subjective Objectivity is the nonsense name I give to the nonsensical, widespread phenomenon in contemporary society of viewing the world through the narrow lens of one’s own experience, and assuming that such personal experience defines the norm for reality. This view is cut straight from the cloth of what Pope Benedict XVI has famously called a dictatorship of relativism. Typically, when pressed to defend the personalized opinions that emerge from such self-centered thinking, most believers of the doctrine will retreat into relativism, claiming t...

Scripture

Ransomed From Your Empty Way of Life

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There is a strand of thought in Christianity which supposes that each person, to be saved, is obliged to believe in Jesus as the Christ, wherein they will be judged righteous by God, with no reference to the lives they have led (i.e. their works). I think this is an oversimplification, failing to grasp either the defining significance of our lived lives, or the complex character of a believing faith. I also think the second reading in today’s liturgy, 1Pet 1.17-21, is awfully difficult to reconcile with such a soteriology. 3rd Sunday of Easter, Yea...

Learning

Adler on Liberal Education

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I wanted to write a follow-up tonight to my last post, refuting the silly (if a bit scary) notion of celebrity gossip as a legitimate form of moral discourse, but I strained my neck last night, and have been unable to spend enough time in front of the computer. I’ll have to come back for that. Instead, I’ve been trying to get through a Mortimer J Adler book I started in late February but wasn’t able to do much with in March. I’m not prepared to get into too much detail about it yet, as I’ve only just begun part four of the b...